Drawdio on Veroboard

Drawdio is "a pencil that lets you draw with music" by Jay Silver. Here I have instructions to replace the PCB with stripboard and keep the whole project still small enough to strap to a pencil.

Constructing the Drawdio using stripboard and a few components

There are project constuction details on the Drawdio project pages you can get a kit or just the PCB from Adafruit. Unfortunately for me the international shipping costs were too high (more than 5 times the cost of the PCB). If you are in the same boat, a cheaper option is to buy/salvage/scavenge the components and make up your own circuit board. All the information is available on the project pages, including the parts list (scroll to V1.0) and circuit design. The biggest hurdle is that you won't have the handly PCB. Although the PCB layout is available on the project site, you need to be able to make your own PCBs. Something that I couldn't really embark upon; so here's an alternative.

Veroboard (aka stripboard) is a good way to make up your own circuit boards. It is a circuit board with parallel copper tracks on one side and peppered with holes so you can place components into it anywhere. However, to make up a particular circuit you need to plan where to put the components, where to break the tracks and where to place wire links. Having gone through this process I thought I'd put up the design to save others from having to do it again, hence the photos below. They should show you all you need to do to make up a Drawdio using verobaord and it looks like it's about the same size as the kit's PCB. Checkout the video for a demo.

Image 1: The track cuts on a 29x5 piece of Veroboard - note the letters on the left and see how they correspond to the diagram beneath the circuit board. Also the component layout and how they wire into the tracks on the underside. There is also a high res image of the track layouts.

Image 2: The components fitted. Note that for Q1 I used an 8050 NPN transistor and for Q2 I used a 8550 PNP transistor. Special thanks to Dave for picking out the parts I needed. There is also a high res image of the fitted components.

Image 3: I could not source any copper foil so used the core of some mains cable.